When I address the death penalty, I am no stranger to the issue. On June 8, 2000, a priest and friend, who had welcomed me on my first day in the seminary years earlier, was brutally murdered by a drunken young man who broke into his rectory in Germantown, Maryland, looking for money. The state prosecutor wanted to seek the death penalty but the priest’s family urged him not to, citing the priest’s opposition to capital punishment. After the murderer’s conviction, the judge imposed a 42 ½ year sentence on him. I agree with the priest’s family: a long prison sentence but not death.
Why not put to death a vicious criminal? After all, in the Bible we read: life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand and foot for foot [Deuteronomy 19:21]. But, in the same Bible, when God punished King David for contriving to have his soldier, Uriah, killed so he would not discover that David had committed adultery with his wife, God did not condemn the king to death but rather confronted him through the prophet Nathan and gave the king the opportunity to repent and be forgiven.
Jesus urges us to love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you [Matthew 5:44]. It is a struggle for most people to embrace this teaching, although many eventually do. But Jesus’ words raise a fair question: can the state, charged with maintaining civil order, forego the retribution of life for life and take another approach in punishing vicious criminals?
In 1965 the legislators of West Virginia found another way. They abolished the death penalty in the Mountain State. Perhaps it bothered them that, in exacting a life for a life, the state was committing deadly violence, just as the criminal had done. There was no compelling evidence then, as there is none now, that capital punishment deterred violent crime. Some undoubtedly thought that a long prison sentence might give the convicted criminal time to reform. That can happen.
Chuck Colson, a White House counselor to President Richard Nixon, spent a year in prison for his role in the Watergate scandal. While there he converted to Christ and, after his release, founded Prison Fellowship to aid prisoners and their families. Stephen Richards spent nine years in prison for drug dealing but used his time there to earn a college degree and, after prison, an MA and a Ph.D. He now teaches criminal justice at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh. Kevin Metrick spent seven years in prison for hacking into the software of Digital Equipment Co. Now, fittingly, he heads a firm that helps companies fill gaps in their security system. None of these men were sentenced to death for their crimes but they illustrate the truth that prisoners can reform.
Some of our legislators are understandably frustrated with crime and want to reinstate the death penalty to punish perpetrators. I have been robbed twice, so I’m no friend of crime. But is capital punishment the right approach to curbing serious crime? Before making such a drastic decision, is it not prudent to remember why we abolished capital punishment many decades ago? A death sentence serves only to express the anger of the state and aggrieved families; it does not prevent future violent crimes; it is inflicted disproportionately on the poor and on racial minorities and it wastes taxpayers’ money.
On November 3, 2023, the City of Philadelphia settled a lawsuit with Walter Osgood for $9,100,000 after he was exonerated of a murder it was later discovered he did not commit. He had spent twenty-three years on death row. He escaped execution but Philadelphia is paying a big price for its miscarriage of justice. Since 1973 many dozens of death row inmates across the country have been exonerated and released. Is it worth the risk of putting to death an innocent Walter Osgood to bring back a practice that has no real benefit to the citizens of our state and which West Virginia previously abolished?
+Mark E. Brennan
Bishop of Wheeling-Charleston
